Beginnings and Endings

I just saw a robin on my walk.  It got me thinking.  Seems like we always rave about seeing the "first" robin in the spring.  Often we see one before all the snow is melted.  But, I don't remember anyone ever saying, "I saw the last robin this fall".  

What is wrong with celebrating endings?  The birth of a child, their first breath in the world?  Can't there be celebration in our last breath?  Why do we cover up the goodbyes?  They are part of the circle.  Do we really want to live linear?

Beginnings can be as terrifying as endings.  The bottom of the dark hole is not the easiest place to be.  It's a beginning.  The climb out of the hole is a finish, but walking away from the hole is just another beginning.

So, do we really have to keep denying ourselves our endings?  I've shed many tears and missed many hours of sleep in anguish over endings.  Maybe it's because endings don't encourage company. They are lonely places.  Maybe we don't even want company.  

I think saying, "See you later" instead of "Goodbye" is a good idea.  The hello will appear again.  The circle will complete itself.

I escaped geometry in high school.  I don't remember how, but I did.  I took two years of algebra, so I got away with not having Bob Martin for geometry!  Whew!  Maybe that was where I missed the inevitability of endings becoming beginnings.

       

Watching television as a child didn't help me understand.  Cinderella ended at the beginning.  Same with Wizard of Oz.  Gilligan's Island just keep on and on at the beginning.  If there had been a rescue it would have ended the show.  Same with Hogan's Heroes.  

Feeling real endings like death, retirement from teaching, selling my home, moving, injuring myself all have had a big impact on me.  Enough to make me open my eyes and see the beginnings that each ending has offered me.

                                             

I guess that's what the statement,
"When a door closes, a window opens" suggests.

I want to share some quotes I found to end my thoughts on beginnings and endings.

              "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."  

              -Robert Frost

                         

              "There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  

               The other is as though everything is a miracle.   -Albert Einstein

                                                                 

             "I wanted a perfect ending.  Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't 

              rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.  Life is about not

              knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without             

              knowing what's going to happen next.  Delicious Ambiguity."  -Gilda Radner

                                                                

             "Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, 

             for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  You have to love.  You have to feel. 

             It is the reason you are here on earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to

             be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt,

             or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all 

             around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself you tasted as many as you 

             could."   -Louise Erdrich,  The Painted Drum LP